Our View: Immunize your children

Eradicating diseases through the use of vaccines isn’t a debate we still should be having in the 21st Century United States.

Thanks to vaccinations, smallpox has been wiped out across the globe, saving millions of lives. Polio and diphtheria have been nearly eliminated and basically have vanished in the developed world.

We’re not treating diseases with leeches or magic potions anymore. They’re being eliminated through medicine – often through vaccines provided to children for their own sake and the larger sake of the community, region, nation and planet.

Medical experts attribute the uptick in measles cases to a simple reason: Children who weren’t vaccinated. Some are children who immigrated to this country, which will remain a complicated matter that is continuously addressed – as it should.

The other group are children whose parents refused to vaccinate their children for either religious reasons or parents who hold to long-debunked theories that such vaccinations lead to autism.

The Internet is full of terrible ideas and people who are willing to support them. Preventing kids from being vaccinated is one of them, and it’s a social health concern that unfortunately medical science and the more knowledgeable public will have to continue to battle.

We hope that battle for knowledge continues to go in medical science’s favor so the battle for the eradication of potentially deadly diseases won’t be further thwarted.